For the best user experience, upgrade your browser.

Thanks for visiting! This site makes use of some web technologies not supported by Internet Explorer 9. To optimize your experience, please upgrade your browser. If you prefer, you can use a different browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.

Life Gets Better

The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older

0 of 1 copy available

1 person waiting per copy

The acclaimed author of What's Worth Knowing reveals the truth about aging: Old age often offers a richer, better, and more self-assured life than youth.

From our earliest lives, we are told that our youth will be the best time of our lives-that the energy and vitality of youth are the most important qualities a person can possess, and that everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is not the golden era it is often made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with anxiety, angst, confusion, and the torture of uncertainty. Conversely, the media often feeds us a vision of growing older as a journey of defeat and diminishment. They are dead wrong. As Lustbader counters, Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical."

Life Gets Better is not a precious or whimsical tome on the quirky wisdom of the elderly. Lustbader-who has worked for several decades as a social worker specializing in aging issues-conducted firsthand research with aging and elderly people in all walks of life, and she found that they overwhelmingly spoke of the mental and emotional richness they have drawn from aging. Lustbader discovered that rather than experiencing a decline from youth, aging people were happier, more courageous, and more interested in being true to their inner selves than were young people.

Life Gets Better examines through first-person stories, as well as Lustbader's own observations, how a lifetime of lessons learned can yield one of the most personally and emotionally fruitful periods of anyone's life. As an eighty-six-year-old who contributed her story to the book noted, "For me, being old is the reward for outlasting all the big and little problems that happen to all of us along life's pathway."

The collected stories in Life Gets Better provide a hopeful corrective to the fear of aging aggressively instilled in us by the media. Don't dread the future: The best years of our lives just may be ahead.

0 of 1 copy available

1 person waiting per copy

The acclaimed author of What's Worth Knowing reveals the truth about aging: Old age often offers a richer, better, and more self-assured life than youth.

From our earliest lives, we are told that our youth will be the best time of our lives-that the energy and vitality of youth are the most important qualities a person can possess, and that everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is not the golden era it is often made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with anxiety, angst, confusion, and the torture of uncertainty. Conversely, the media often feeds us a vision of growing older as a journey of defeat and diminishment. They are dead wrong. As Lustbader counters, Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical."

Life Gets Better is not a precious or whimsical tome on the quirky wisdom of the elderly. Lustbader-who has worked for several decades as a social worker specializing in aging issues-conducted firsthand research with aging and elderly people in all walks of life, and she found that they overwhelmingly spoke of the mental and emotional richness they have drawn from aging. Lustbader discovered that rather than experiencing a decline from youth, aging people were happier, more courageous, and more interested in being true to their inner selves than were young people.

Life Gets Better examines through first-person stories, as well as Lustbader's own observations, how a lifetime of lessons learned can yield one of the most personally and emotionally fruitful periods of anyone's life. As an eighty-six-year-old who contributed her story to the book noted, "For me, being old is the reward for outlasting all the big and little problems that happen to all of us along life's pathway."

The collected stories in Life Gets Better provide a hopeful corrective to the fear of aging aggressively instilled in us by the media. Don't dread the future: The best years of our lives just may be ahead.

Holds explained

The Kindle Book format for this title is not supported on:

Disney video end user license agreement (EULA)

Before you stream any Disney Content, carefully read this EULA. Before you can license any Disney Content, you will be asked to accept all the terms of this EULA. If you do not wish to accept all the terms of this EULA, you will not be able to license the Disney Content.

You understand and agree that the Disney Content you receive through the OverDrive service, such as Disney movies, images, artwork and other copyrightable materials (the "Disney Content") is licensed by OverDrive from Disney. The Disney Content you receive through the OverDrive service, including the copyrights in the Disney Content, is owned by Disney, and is protected by the copyright laws of the United States, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties. OverDrive and Disney do not transfer any title, right or interest to or in the Disney Content to you.

Disney Content delivered to you through the OverDrive service is licensed to you; not sold, transferred or assigned to you.

OverDrive grants you a non-exclusive and non-assignable sublicense to stream and view a copy of the Disney Content only on approved devices only for the purpose of your personal, non-commercial viewing of the Disney Content consistent with the terms of this license. The delivery of the Disney Content does not transfer to you any commercial or promotional use rights in the Disney Content. All other rights in the Disney Content are reserved by Disney, and any other use is strictly prohibited.

You may not transfer, distribute, copy or reproduce the Disney Content or any portion thereof onto any physical medium, memory, server, device or other hardware, or any other medium now known or hereafter devised. In addition, you may not sell, rent, lease, redistribute or sublicense the Disney Content. You may not attempt to circumvent, avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, impair or otherwise defeat any encryption, rights signaling or copy protection technology in which the Disney Content is wrapped or otherwise associated with, and you may not edit, modify, translate or create derivative works or adaptations of the Disney Content. You may not decompile, copy, reproduce, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise reduce the computer file in which the Disney Content is stored to a human-readable form.

You may not stream or transmit Disney Content outside of the United States of America and Canada, and their respective territories, possessions and associated commonwealths.

The Disney Content is provided "AS IS". Disney expressly disclaims any warranties and conditions, express, implied, or statutory, including but not limited to, warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, satisfactory quality and noninfringement, and their equivalents under the laws of any jurisdiction. Disney does not warrant or otherwise state that the Disney Content will meet your requirements.

Under no circumstances shall Disney be liable for any damages, including any direct, indirect, special, incidental or consequential damages of any kind under any legal theory (tort, contract or otherwise) that result from the use of, or the inability to use, the Disney Content, even if Disney has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Any material breach of the EULA, including without limitation, copying or distribution of the Disney Content, will result in termination of the license for such Disney Content.

Success!

Send to Nook® app

If this is your first time selecting "Send to NOOK® app," you will be taken to a Barnes & Noble page to sign into (or create) your NOOK account. You should only have to sign into your NOOK account once to link it to your library account. After this one-time step, periodicals will be automatically sent to your NOOK account when you select "Send to NOOK® app."

You can read periodicals on any NOOK tablet or in the free NOOK reading app for iOS, Android, or Windows 8.